Post navigation

PWSA trouble; VisitPittsburgh admonitions

PWSA trouble; VisitPittsburgh admonitions

Word out
of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) is that the oversight agency has rejected the
City of Pittsburgh’s phased-in plan to start paying for the water supplied to
it by the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority (PWSA).

Instead of paying nothing,
as had been the case for decades, the city and PWSA cut a deal in which the
city, beginning in 2021, will pay
20 percent of the total annual bill. Payments would rise to 40 percent in 2022;
60 percent in 2023; 80 percent in 2024; 100 percent in 2025 and thereafter.

But the PUC has
rejected that deal and says the city must pay full freight as soon as its users
are metered. While that leaves a lot of wiggle room – delaying metering to
delay paying — it technically could cost the city an additional $20 million
annually.

Where the city
finds that kind of cash in an already cash-strapped coronavirus pandemic
environment is anybody’s guess.

That said,
it’s pretty shocking that the city ever had such a sweetheart agreement with
the PWSA to receive its water gratis. But such were the dealings with an
agency that the city previously used not only for its public utility needs but
those political as well.

We’re told
it’s “a new day” at the PWSA as it struggles to rehabilitate a system long left
to languish and now under the aegis of the PUC. But our doubts loom large.

After all,
this is a supposedly independent authority that the mayor already has
poison-pilled with a vow to never allow it to be privatized. Politics trumps
the efficacious conveyance of a vital public service yet again, we see.

But the huge
and growing crater that the coronavirus pandemic has created for Pittsburgh’s
finances very well could force the city to privatize water service as the need
for cash grows.

What a shame
it would be, however, that it took a crisis to force the city to do what it
could have done, and should have done, in less turbulent times — and to the
public’s benefit.

VisitPittsburgh,
the region’s tourism
agency, has a new boss. And here’s hoping he’s nothing like the old boss.

Jerad
Bachar, interim CEO since Craig Davis left for a similar position in Dallas in
December, was named as the new guy on Wednesday.

He’ll
certainly have his work cut out for himself, given the coronavirus pandemic has
all but ended the tourist trade in the market area VisitPittsburgh serves.

And we
certainly hope Bachar has a better handle on economic reality in general than
Davis did.

You’ll
recall that Davis steadfastly (even after he left) shilled for a new, publicly
financed hotel to be attached to the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.

Never mind
that, prior to the pandemic, private investors had stepped up to build hundreds
of new hotel rooms that served the center’s needs most satisfactorily.

Nonetheless,
Davis favored building taxpayer-subsidized hotel rooms to compete with those
built privately. Such Mickey Mouse economics don’t cut it in normal times let
alone in times post-pandemic.

Davis also
was the guy who fondly recalled 2009’s G-20 economic summit at the convention
center. Said Davis, after leaving Pittsburgh:

“The joke
was that if we could host the top world leaders successfully, we could
certainly handle your convention.”

But the G-20
economic summit was an unmitigated economic disaster for a large swath of downtown
Pittsburgh businesses. Security perimeters turned much of the central business
district into a ghost town.